


Self Taught

by Jasandmonty



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: 3+1, Angst, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Minor Character Death, Monty/Miller if you look really hard, Post-Mount Weather, bellamy being everyone's dad tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-17
Updated: 2015-02-17
Packaged: 2018-03-13 09:41:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3376844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jasandmonty/pseuds/Jasandmonty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The fact that he held a girl while she died or gave a pep talk to a boy who couldn't leave his own skin unmarked anymore or even offered John fucking Murphy a position to guard the camp hadn't taught him a single thing. Bellamy still didn't understand the concept of comfort despite the fact that he'd taught it to everyone else."</p><p>(or 3 times Clarke watched Bellamy comfort people and the 1 time she did it to him)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Self Taught

**Author's Note:**

> First fic I've posted on AO3. Idk I've always wanted to write about Bellamy's whole dad-vibe that he has going with the 100. There might be a shit ton of grammar problems, I wrote this at like 3 AM. Also hit me up on Tumblr @babeliciousrockgod Enjoy ~

I.  
The mountain burned behind them, but she didn't think to look back.

Really, she didn't want to look back. Looking back meant facing the smoke that was likely to be filling the sky with grey, even more so than it had when Jasper shot the bomb on the bridge. It made her feel sick to her stomach back then, and it had the same effect now when someone called her name and she was forced to look back.

"Clarke!" 

Bellamy was carrying someone. It was someone small, with a mess of black hair that fell over his arms like ink spilling onto the charcoal ground that he knelt down to. Clarke hurried over with confusion spinning around her head because she really didn't recognize the person he was leaning over. But then she did.

"Maya," Clarke breathed out, disbelief coloring her voice though she isn't sure why. Obviously she'd already known that Maya wouldn't live outside Mount Weather. She couldn't. Radiation turned people like her into burned up corpses, similar to the ones that still lay scattered around the Dropship. (Why can't she stop associating everything with a previous tragedy? Why does everything they do start to blur together into an indistinguishable blur of blood and smoke?) "I don't think there's anything we can do."

Bellamy's face was so helpless that it made her chest hurt. "Nothing?" 

"It's an 8 hour hike back to Camp Jaha. Even if we had someone willing to give them her blood, we wouldn't save her in time. And besides it might kill whoever volunteers." She added that last part because Bellamy's mouth had opened like he was about to volunteer himself. 

"She saved my life." He whispered, sounding hollow. A flash of Bellamy's face when Octavia had gone missing months ago surfaced and matched his current expression. She knew what he was thinking. It was the all too familiar feeling of if only I'd done something different, if only I'd tried harder or fought longer or thought more. It was something Clarke knew well.

Maya's breathing was labored. Her previously clear skin was now red and blistered, her eyes dazed. There were angry marks from the radiation that crawled down her neck (the neck that Clarke had once threatened to slit) and she managed to get out a quiet, raspy plea, just like Atom had. (She did it again.) Clarke didn't hear exactly what the word was, but she could guess by the look on Bellamy's face and the fact that he reached for a gun. 

"Jasper should be here," He said suddenly, desperately. But Maya shook her head from where she lay in his lap, her lips trying again to form words. She didn't want Jasper to see this, and Clarke silently agreed. Bellamy must have agreed too, because he nodded and clicked his gun's safety off. "May we meet again." He whispered into Maya's dark hair before pulling the trigger.

Clarke didn't know if the look in his eyes or the sound that escaped his mouth hurt worse. 

II.  
Though Maya hadn't agreed in her final moments, Jasper thought he should have been there. 

Clarke understood. She couldn't imagine what it would be like to fight your way out of Hell and finally reach safety only to find out that person who'd led you away was gone. That probably explained the bruises that colored his legs and the claw marks on his arms. She hated it, the sight of self-inflicted damage on the kid who use to wear ski goggles everywhere and hug people when he got excited.

"Why are you doing this to yourself?" She asked him in a muttered whisper, enough incredulity in her voice that Jasper lifted his eyes from where they'd been glued to the ground.

"Take a wild guess."

She didn't answer. Clearly she knew the answer, but saying it out loud might hurt Jasper more than the moonshine she was pressing to the cuts on his arm. Instead, she asked, "Does Monty know?"

"No," He looked at her with serious eyes. Something she never use to see from him before Mount Weather. "And I want to keep it that way. He's happy with Miller, I want it to stay that way." 

Bellamy hurried inside before Clarke could respond, and she's kind of relieved that she doesn't have to. His dark eyes skim Jasper's injuries with disappointment. Bellamy didn't work in the infirmary, so he has no idea the amount of people that come in with injuries exactly like Jasper's. Clarke has to admit, though, that she's surprised it could happen to someone like Jasper. "You're doing this to yourself?" Bellamy asked, inspecting a four inch cut on Jasper's left forearm. 

"It's not even a choice anymore," Jasper huffed with such exhaustion loaded behind his words that Clarke wanted to cry. His eyes had permanent dark circles beneath them and he was carefully avoiding eye contact with Bellamy. "In Mount Weather I was so...angry. And when I try to fall asleep at night I remember everything they did to my friends--to Monty and Harper--and I get the same feeling of just--wanting to kill someone that I got whenever I killed Doctor Tsing. Now all I have is myself to take the anger out on."

"Well don't." Bellamy supplied. 

Jasper scoffed. "Thanks. I'm cured."

"No, Jas, I mean it. Just don't." Bellamy pressed. "If you give in that easy, you won't survive. Whenever you do this to yourself, you're just surrendering. Giving up. You have to fight it. Get to the point that you'd rather do anything else than hurt yourself. Go split a thousand bullets or make gallons of moonshine, do anything else but this. I know you can be stubborn. I saw it in Mount Weather. You loved everyone so much that you fought with everything you had to keep them safe."

"Because I care about them," Jasper argued weakly, his voice lacking its previous bitter venom. 

Bellamy merely straightened up, patting the broken kid on the back and offered him a word of advice that warmed Clarke's heart. 

"Care about yourself, dammit." 

III.  
The City of Light was a damn hoax.

Those were Murphy's exact words. He came back to camp bloody and lost and accompanied by two other people. Three out of the fourteen who had left. 

"'S my own damn fault, really." He mumbled into the cup of water that Clarke forced him to drink while she got to work on setting his broken leg. "I was the one who insisted we go North. He told me it might not work and I still insisted."

She didn't have to ask who "he" was, or why Murphy said the word with so much regret in his eyes. Jaha was dead. The camp was his memorial now, though Clarke had always liked to think that the Jaha in Camp Jaha was meant for Wells, not his father. Though Clarke hadn't been a fan near the end, Murphy apparently had become attatched to Thelonious. 

"How'd you escape?" Bellamy asked, his voice no longer holding the stiff, cold tone that it use to when spoken toward Murphy. 

"Emori," He said her name with a sort of hopelessness. "Dragged me away after they went to town on my leg. She said her people needed food, water, everything we had. She said they had no choice but to attack us, yet somehow she could manage to spare me."

"She loved you?" Bellamy asked.

Murphy shook his head. "If she loved me, she wouldn't have done that. Now that Jaha's dead I guess I'm back to being the only traitor around here. Might as well just go back out to that damn desert again, maybe find a new girl with deformed hands."

At this, Bellamy almost looked offended. "Then I guess my speech to the Guard on why they should let you in was for nothing?"

Clarke had stopped believing in miracles a long time ago, but the sight of Murphy grinning up at Bellamy had sparked a bit of faith.

+I.  
Leaders cried pretty often, but not in front of people. 

Clarke knew firsthand. She knew what it was like to bury your face in the scratchy fabric of a pillow every night and pray that no one walked in to see why you were making so much noise. Bellamy must have known too, because he looked increasingly tired as days slipped by until eventually he came into her tent just before sunset.

"I want to sleep again," His voice was rough and that's how she knew he'd been crying. "I don't care what kind of weird Earth drug I have to get from Jasper and Monty or how much medicine I have to drink, I just want to sleep again."

"If there was a drug, I would have already found it." Clarke assured him, unlacing her boots and scooting over on her bed. He took the movement as an invitation to collapse beside her, his added weight making the poorly constructed matress dip under them. "Maybe you just need company."

"Does that work?"

Clarke realized in that moment that the guy hadn't learned his own lesson. The fact that he held a girl while she died or gave a pep talk to a boy who couldn't leave his own skin unmarked anymore or even offered John fucking Murphy a position to guard the camp hadn't taught him a single thing. Bellamy still didn't understand the concept of comfort despite the fact that he'd taught it to everyone else. 

"You can sleep here tonight," She offered quietly, pulling back her bedding and crawling under. She had to press herself against the tent wall to make room for him, but somehow she didn't mind. "Tell me how this worked in the morning."


End file.
